


Death Ray

by sigmalied



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/F, Other, Renegade Shepard (Mass Effect), post-omega dlc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 11:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14872547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigmalied/pseuds/sigmalied
Summary: Shepard had an interesting dream last night. Aria doesn't care, except, she does.





	Death Ray

“I had a dream yesterday.”

The statement, quiet and reflective, is given an undue echo by the walls of the armory. Aria almost - _almost_ \- affords Shepard a sidelong glance, but she decides to stay focused on the gun part she cleans beneath a lamp pouring over the workbench.

The parts, tools, and cloths scattered before them are anointed with a cleaning fluid that weighs the air with a pungent scent of oil. Smoke particulates cast feeble shadows as they rise from an ashtray, and a pair of crystal glasses filled with variable amounts of Earth whiskey glow deep honeyed amber, ice long since melted. Rings of condensation gather around the bases.

It’s just the two of them. Armor shed at the door, civilian clothes donned for comfort. They’ve shut themselves away between the racks of guns, armor, and heavy ordinance sleeping behind biometrics and twenty-digit passcode locks, where they take refuge from the station’s noise. Reviving Omega from the catatonic state Cerberus left it in is no small operation, and after a week of sleep deprivation and incessant administrating, the mundanity pacifies Aria without robbing her of occupation.

“Did you hear me?” Shepard asks. She flirts with the possibility of becoming yet another grating noise Aria has grown averse to.

“The funny thing about dreams,” Aria replies, “is that they’re only interesting to the one who dreamt them.”

Shepard is here, wading through the rubble and bodies, for what Aria has promised her and nothing more: eezo and vessels. The trouble is that Aria has been unable to meet the first shipment’s deadline, as her syndicate is already stretched thread-bare like not enough gauze to stop the profuse bleeding of credits and resources. She does not apologize, but the least she can do is accompany Shepard - and put her to work - over the delay period of one or two days.

Yet, as much as she values Shepard, Aria doesn’t remember therapy sessions being included in her fee.

“I dreamed of battles,” says Shepard. Aria’s cold indifference hasn’t discouraged her from continuing. With a few parts collected in hand, she references a schematic on a datapad while reassembling a turian pistol. The parts snap seamlessly together. “Some of them I fought in, some of them invented. _Big_ cities. Shattered skylines and all.”

Aria finds herself _mildly_ interested. So long as Shepard keeps her account succinct and focuses on the important details, she will retain her audience. After a long, indulgent pull on her cigarette, she notices Shepard pointing at a tool outside of her reach. She raises her brow at her, unimpressed, but slides it over.

“Everywhere I went,” Shepard says, “I’d see flashes of red light, striking like lightning. They destroyed everything and everyone they touched. Skyscrapers turned into puddles of molten glass. People became shadows on the ground. Ponds and fountains instantly boiled away.”

“Nightmares about the Reapers?” Aria infers.

“Seems so.”

Aria has yet to physically encounter a Reaper herself, but she knows what they look like, what they _sound_ like, and what utter destruction they rain upon civilization. They are worthy subjects of nightmares indeed, and that Shepard has survived multiple engagements with those monstrosities is only a testament to her prowess as an elite soldier.

She offers Shepard a cigarette with a phlegmatic extension of her arm. Shepard accepts, brushing her fingers against Aria’s while receiving it. It's an intimacy of questionable intent, but of inevitable effect. After all, Aria has always liked the look of her eyes. How wildness lingers just beneath a luster of red that crosses her pupils under certain incident light. The warmth of cybernetics reminds Aria that the programmed death of flesh is negotiable.

Shepard places the cigarette between crimson-painted lips. They’re the same shade as human blood, composing the perfect frame for the threats and imprecations with which Aria has heard her gore enemies and friends alike.

Aria leans in, letting the burning end of her own cigarette ignite Shepard’s.

She remembers with sordid amusement the last time they were close like this, brought together as the ecstasy of righteous vengeance surged through Aria’s veins. And judging by the heady gaze Shepard returns, eyelids dark like coals for the embers in her eyes, she remembers too.

“That’s all it was,” Shepard says. “Just swinging the scythe.”

“What the hell do farming tools have to do with anything?”

Aria’s confusion causes _Shepard_ confusion, until she realizes the issue. “Oh.” She smiles. “Right. You see, in my language, the name for the Reapers comes from a mythological personification of death. It wields a scythe and uses it for harvesting the deceased, like one harvests a field.”

“Ah,” Aria vocalizes. Lost to thought, she wets her lips and decides to contribute, “The common asari name for the Reapers translates to _the hands of doom._ It’s to the same effect, more or less.”

They’re quiet. Aria neglects her own work to watch Shepard, leaning back against the workbench with her arms folded over her middle and her legs crossed at the knees.

Shepard’s hands move under the stark light of the lamp, delineating all her scars; the occasional nick and jagged line, several of which are beginning to pale to anemic ivory. Her tendons flex like a plucked collagen chordophone and the shallow lines demarcating bone from muscle in her bare forearms arise whenever she turns her wrists. Shepard frees one hand to remove the cigarette from her lips and rest her palm on the bench. The other tucks locks of forward-fallen hair behind her ear - red velvet theatre curtains drawn on a single act. When she exhales, the lights of the armory wane behind a thin veil of smoke.

Aria feels a little warm beneath her belt. She permits that sensation to bloom as she selfishly consumes Shepard in her idle imagination, picks her apart like dinner. Wonders if those rigorous hands have any talent outside the arena of war, if they can hold thighs as steadily as firearms. Maybe they’re just executors of ruthless brutality and have no place in the bedroom. Aria wouldn’t mind either way.

If only she didn’t _talk_ so much.

“It’s interesting,” says Shepard. If she is aware of Aria’s scrutiny, she does not reveal it. “By the end of the dream, I realized it wasn’t the Reapers. Or, if it was, they weren’t doing it by themselves. It was me all along. Everything I looked at was destroyed, _because_ I looked at it. I was death. A ray of death.”

Aria scoffs. “Sounds like wishful thinking to me. A better interpretation to help you sleep.”

“It could’ve been.” Shepard looks over at Aria, catching her directly in the path of emanated mischief. “But I think I liked it.”

“Because you were in control again.”

Aria has lived centuries longer than Shepard can ever hope to last. She possesses all the answers to anything she might say or ask. And yet, she does not quite know how to interpret the look she gives her now. Shepard rests her elbows on the workbench, supporting her head with one palm cradling her jaw, and she cants her head at Aria, eyeing her through a near-palpable fog of daydreams. Her gaze rakes up and down her figure, devouring the sight of her, and Aria likes it.

Shepard asks, “What do you dream about?”

The temptation to roll her eyes is strong, but Aria humors her. To a limited extent. “Places,” she replies. “People. Things that need to be done. Things I want.”

“Like?”

Aria’s lips curl into a faint smile, which she presents as her answer.

 _“Like?”_ Shepard insists. She straightens out her spine and takes a shifting step closer, humor transmuting into greed.

“Like not having to answer your stupid questions anymore.”

“So is that how you feel about me?”

“It’s hard not to, Shepard. You ask questions like you’re entitled to them.”

Shepard is standing beside her now with one hand folded on the workbench, a single whim away from touching Aria’s hip. “Aren’t I? I helped put your ass back on the throne. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“It does. Except, we’ve already stipulated your dues. I owe you nothing else. Not even my attention.”

They drift closer. Aria uncrosses her knees in silent invitation as Shepard’s face hovers before hers. She can smell her citrus-perfumed shampoo, concealing, along with her lipstick and shadowed eyes, the hideousness of her life behind beauty and charm. It’s a familiar tradition.

“You’re such a bitch, you know that?”

Aria enjoys the way her voice dips into a rough whisper, sending a jolt from the bottom of her spine to the base of her skull. “You don’t need to tell _me_ that, Shepard,” she agrees. A wicked undercurrent carries her tone. “And I know that everyone, even you, adores me for it.”

Hands brush against her hips with nearly enough bravery on Shepard’s behalf to get her killed on the spot. Between them, it is _Aria_ who decides when and where she is to be touched, if at all. Besides, there are smears of oil and grease across Shepard’s palms and fingertips, dark and glistening, and she wants them nowhere near her clothes. Aria bracelets her fingers around Shepard’s wrists, peels them away from her body, and pushes them forward to hold her arms stiff and straight at her sides, fit for a coffin. 

“Touch me again,” she warns, “and you lose these.”

“You don’t _really_ mean that—“

“I do. If they fixed you once, they can fix you again.”

Shepard’s fiery complacency is snuffed out to a withering trail of smoke. She swallows and reevaluates her position. Aria can almost parse the commander’s thoughts by the quivering of her irises, all that supercoiled indignity and threatened pride. The fingernails around Shepard’s wrists curl inward and tighten, hooking into her flesh like barbed wire. Not in fear of losing her captive, but to delight in the visible discomfort she tries and fails to suppress.

But Shepard, much like Aria, is not one to follow rules. She bends them, breaks them beyond repair. It comes as no surprise when she whispers against the side of Aria's head, “You’re only holding me back because you’re afraid of what I’d do to you.” 

“Shut the fuck up, Shepard,” Aria hisses. “You’re so fucking stupid.”

Even as she condemns her, Aria turns, bidding Shepard to face her, and leans in. She bites her before she kisses her. Sinks her teeth into Shepard’s bottom lip hard enough to make her gasp, then leaves a firm caress behind on the new wound. The taste of blood meets the tip of her tongue, sweet and metallic.

Shepard is all too eager to comply. She tilts her head and careens into the kiss, smudgingAria’s lips crimson. When Shepard presses herself up against her, Aria can feel the bench's edge digging into the small of her back, making her inhale audibly, sharp and pleased. The thick heels of her boots scrape dull against the floor for better purchase as Shepard’s enthusiasm nearly hurts her.

Shepard pulls away and ruins the moment by speaking against Aria’s mouth, “I want to ask you something.”

“Do you ever stop talking, Shepard?”

Apparently not.

“I’ve been thinking,” Shepard says between the teasing kisses she places on Aria’s lips. “When the war ends, I want to get married. Will you come to my wedding?”

Aria quietly laughs. The suggestion is already ridiculous enough without factoring in its plausibility. “You really think you’re going to crawl out of this alive?” She scoffs. “That’s cute.”

Shepard smiles. “I will. And I want you there.”

Even as she designs new ways to mock her, Aria lowers her mouth to the curve of Shepard’s neck and shoulder and bites her _hard_. Shepard grunts and goes rigid, then lax, trying to bend away from her.

Though she presses her lips against the reddening imprints left behind, Aria has reserved little mercy for her. “If you make it, I’ll consider it,” she says, and wedges her knee between Shepard’s thighs. “Maybe I’ll seduce your bondmate on your wedding night. Ruin them a bit for you. Ever think of that?”

Shepard angles her weight forward to slip a thigh between Aria’s legs in reciprocation, bringing her along for the ride. When she presses up, Aria can feel tight muscle rubbing her through their clothes, so boastful and sure, threatening to lift her to her toes if she does not yield outright. She likes seeing Shepard take that bold initiative. Even if she dies trying.

Aria tilts her head to allow Shepard to kiss and rake her teeth along her neck. Sweet as poisoned honey, she whispers, “So how long have you wanted me, Shepard? Don’t think I never noticed how you looked at me.” She rocks her hips lithely into Shepard’s to give her words a well-honed edge. Moving herself along the thigh between hers makes Aria wet, but she knows her self-control will outlast Shepard’s. She instigates further by asking, “Did you always want to fuck me?”

Shepard shivers at the words. “If there’s a panther in the room,” she breathes, “do you stare at it because it’s beautiful, or because it might kill you?”

“I should think _both,”_ says Aria.

Shepard, as usual, runs hot and impatient. She grinds her hips into Aria’s without any further encouragement - rough and forceful and only slightly misaligned - while squirming against the iron grip on her, desperate to reclaim her hands. Maybe Shepard believes that turning her on will loosen her resolve, but Aria has never been one to lose her head easily.

“Do you really want to know?” Shepard mutters beside her ear, then dips her head to apply a firm kiss against the front of Aria’s throat. “What I thought about you?”

Aria hums in affirmation.

Shepard tells her vulgar things. How she wants to fold Aria’s legs about her waist and make a mess of her, how she wants to bite and smack her ass, squeeze her tits as she takes her in her lap. She tells Aria about how she wants to pin her down and fuck her until she has her arching and dripping around her fingers, slick and throbbing and oversensitive with prior release, with no sign of stopping in sight.

Aria thoroughly enjoys her fantasies, regardless of how conducive they are to reality. They arouse her, amuse her, and expose all of Shepard’s wanting. They make her think back to the hours between bloody skirmishes, where she and Shepard, recuperating and deliberating their next course of action, had exchanged glances and wondered if their heated frustration was borne from the stresses of battle or the compatibility of flesh.

“I’m going to let go of you for now,” Aria tells her. “But if you move, I’ll kill you. I _will_ kill you, Shepard.”

A smile, crooked with uneasy anticipation, cuts across Shepard’s face. She’s red everywhere; her smudged mouth, her silky hair, the aggrieved flush frothing on her cheekbones like blood-dyed sea foam. Threats can’t unnerve her. For an instant, Aria considers whether she really does fear what Shepard might do to her.

Aria releases her wrists. Initially, Shepard is obedient. She stands at perfect attention, precisely how Aria left her - ever the good little Alliance soldier. But she _knows_ Shepard, knows how inclined she is to subvert authority given the chance. Time is limited and Aria wastes no more of it. She takes the hem of her shirt and pulls it over her shoulders and head without a hitch, baring herself to Shepard from the waist up. Aria is satisfied with the way the commander’s smile fades and her jaw sets, desire coating her gaze in a glassy lacquer.

Aria’s skin brushes up against the front of Shepard’s clothes while their lips hover close. Just as predicted, it’s only a matter of seconds before she tries to buck the rules. The instant Aria notices Shepard’s hands sliding forward, she reaches up and seizes her by the throat.

“What did I say?” Aria demands, her nose a centimeter away from Shepard’s. When Shepard doesn’t answer, she repeats with lethality, “What did I _say, Shepard?”_

Her eyebrows draw upward in discomfort. While Aria never truly meant that she’d _kill_ her, necessarily, she isn’t being gentle by any means. “To not move,” Shepard hisses from between her teeth.

“And you did.”

“I did,” she chokes out, clinging impressively to defiance despite her position. “So fucking what?”

Aria digs her nails into her neck, a slow vise shutting on her airway. She loves seeing Shepard’s pretty brow and eyes marred by a wince. “I think I deserve an apology.”

Shepard manages to force a breath of laughter past the hand damming her throat. “I like your tits,” she says. “A lot. But they aren’t worth an apology.”

The comment provokes Aria into lifting Shepard onto the toes of her shoes, one more word of insolence away from serious peril. It’s a convincing bluff - one of Aria’s best - but Shepard calls it with the confidence she’d bring to a late-night card game.

“You always beat on everyone you meet to get what you want?” she hoarsely inquires. “Me too. It’s easier than being likable, isn’t it?”

Aria all but drops Shepard when she releases her, relaxing her hand about her throat before her other joins it, holding her jaw in place. She kisses her with earned violence; teeth and tongue and indulgence. Still, she _will not_ permit Shepard to touch her. A hand slides to the back of Shepard’s head when she tries to stealthily fill her palms with flesh, forms a fist in her hair, and pulls hard enough to break their kiss and tip Shepard back. She concedes and drops her hands.

“I wonder what other races think,” Aria muses aloud, “when they’re with asari.” She holds Shepard as she left her, throat exposed to invading lips. “Do they feel like her plaything, an insect in the grand scheme of her lifetime?” A well-placed graze of teeth against her pulse makes Shepard squirm. “Will she even remember them?”

“Everyone remembers me,” sighs Shepard. “Those who don’t are all dead.”

That makes Aria smile. “Somehow I don’t doubt that.”

When her grip relents, Shepard descends to kiss the top of Aria’s breasts, and moves lower yet where calculated bites stoke the flames of Aria’s want. She feels Shepard apply a wet kiss between her collarbones, the warmth of her tongue lingering in the valley they form.

Their lips touch again when Shepard rises, lightly and without commitment; mere phantoms of lust just as impossible to capture and keep. “Your eyes are black,” she observes between wistful pants. “Did you know that…?”

Aria has indeed known that. She cannot help but grin and ask, “Does it scare you?” It is not an uncommon sentiment expressed by those unaccustomed to asari mates, so fearful of eternity and oblivion once they see it reflected back at them.

“No,” says Shepard. And Aria believes her.

It’s become almost painful, the way Shepard drives herself into her, so embarrassingly young and ignorant of her own strength and its dispensation. But Aria is no frail spring blossom, in body nor temperament, and will not break.

And then Shepard grows rigid, sighing as she firmly pins Aria and rubs the temple of her head against hers while turning to kiss her yet again, lazy and full of distraction. Aria notices how Shepard's lips are swollen from attention and abuse, and how she struggles immensely to keep from seizing her hips again in her dirty hands. 

After Aria realizes what has happened, she laughs cruelly at her. There isn’t a single reason _not_ to, for here stands Commander Shepard, one of the greatest if not _the_ greatest halberds of the war effort, bones liquified and her heart beating quick and hard, desperate enough to get off dry.

“Fuck you,” Shepard weakly growls, then resorts to a familiar line. “You’re such a bitch.” She runs a shaky hand back through her hair as she collects herself.

Aria ignores the insult. She wants to meld with her, if only to experience a first-hand taste of Shepard’s chagrined relief and soothe the ache that fills her bones, but culls the temptation. In truth, she doesn't want to disintegrate Shepard like that, not when she already has it coming to her. Obliteration is days away and Aria doesn't need any more ghosts drifting through her head after the dust settles. She'll remember Shepard just as her senses report: red and angry and intense, like the ray of death she sees in her dreams.

“Go wash your hands,” Aria orders her. When Shepard doesn’t immediately move, she presses a few fingers to the front of her chest, shoves her back, and adds, “Do as I say.”

At least the commander isn’t dense. Shepard looks into the untapped darkness of Aria’s eyes and understands precisely what it is she wants from her. She takes a retreating step before turning on her heel.

“Hurry _up,”_ Aria snaps at Shepard, hating the way she drags her feet on purpose. It pisses her off like nothing else to be left alone with her eyes pitch, naked from the waist up, and her awoken nerves flailing about in her spine like live wires.

She squeezes the bridge of her nose before pulling the ashtray on the workbench toward herself, finds Shepard’s cigarette - made distinct by the red smudges around the filter - with an excessively long head of smoldering ash. After tapping it away, Aria lifts the short stub for a last, calming drag, but the workshop grease on her fingers has strayed too close to the embers. A sharp prick of heat on her skin brings a profanity to her lips and she quickly puts out the cigarette.

It’s left behind in a gray bed of ashes, a quiet tomb.


End file.
